The readers' room: What you thought of G2 this week . . .

Stephen Moss dressed as a clown. Photograph: Martin Godwin for the Guardian

✒Oh no! We've done it again. Last Friday, though we should know better, G2 again committed the unpardonable sin of mentioning video games without concluding that they are an unalloyed blessing for humanity, creating millions of jobs and uncountable hours of healthy entertainment.

Instead, Tom Meltzer dared to suggest that some people spend too long playing them – from the Chinese man who recently died after a three-day gaming spree, to Tom's younger self. As a schoolboy, he would regularly play truant to spend more time with his PlayStation. "Gaming was a place where I could be anyone, do anything – save worlds, win wars, score a goal in the World Cup final; in short, be a hero, instead of a lonely and unpopular teenager," he explained. This was not entirely typical, he noted. One expert put the level of "addiction" at less than a half per cent.

At guardian.co.uk/g2, hamletsghost was still so furious you could hear his chains rattle: "Yet another dreary scare story about addictive video games. The general agreement seems to be that the people who spend a lot of time playing games are the ones who are unhappy with the rest of their life . . . People can treat golf in exactly the same way, and some do, but we never hear scare stories about that. There's a reason that it isn't labelled as an addiction, and it's shoddy journalism to call it one."

R042, however, seemed to get an entirely different message from the article. "I'd venture it's one of the most sane and reasoned pieces on the subject I've read, given it keeps highlighting the definition of addiction and saying that in most cases it's not a problem."

Rob30 also thought the piece was "fairly even-handed . . . Obviously there are people that have problems with [video games], as there are people who have problems with substances or sex or whatever. They're substantially in the minority, as the article makes clear."

✒Monday found Sam Leith fretting about the poster for the sci-fi thriller The Adjustment Bureau. "The poster depicts Matt Damon looking intense and running off towards the left," he explained, "while holding hands with a pretty girl (Emily Blunt) who's looking gormless and not really running so much as standing on one leg and facing off at 45 degrees from him."

Not for the first time, Sam reckoned, Hollywood hadn't thought things through. "The immediate future, at least for Damon's foxy friend, seems to hold a twisted ankle and a nasty scrape on the knee. Have you ever tried to run away from a shadowy government agency while holding the hand of a woman in a satin dress and impractical shoes? Experience tells us all that it's next to bloody impossible. Holding hands is good for skipping, like a great big flower-collecting girl. It's not good for shadowy-government-agency fleeing."

"Hahahahahahahahahaha," was the verdict on Twitter. @CRayDancer reckoned the article was "gloriously vitriolic"; for @Azzour it "made my day". "Sarcasm," agreed @arrhenius, "is the lowest but also the funniest form of wit."

The poster didn't have many more fans on the website. "I can't look at it without seeing them hopping," said DannyGray78. "Almost as bad as the poster for Valkyrie, aka Hopping Tom and His Nazi Dwarves." Damntheral, meanwhile, was reminded of "North Korean mural art, where you have the Dear Leader riding a horse while clearly posing on a chair. One version actually has the blurb, 'Like the Bourne Conspiracy meets Inception.' It might as well be a warning: PRODUCT CONTAINS NO ORIGINAL THEME OR ELEMENTS."

✒On Tuesday, Oliver Burkeman reported from South by Southwest Interactive, "the world's highest-profile gathering of geeks and the venture capitalists who love them". Among the speakers was publisher Tim O'Reilly, touting what he calls "sensor-driven collective intelligence", and Oliver thought it was time to decipher the jargon. "When the GPS system in your phone or iPad can relay your location to any site or device you like, when Facebook uses facial recognition on photographs posted there, and when the location of your car can influence a constantly changing, sensor-driven congestion-charging scheme, all in real time, something has qualitatively changed. You're still creating the web, but without the conscious need to do so." Or, to quote O'Reilly, "Increasingly . . . everything and everyone in the world casts an 'information shadow', an aura of data, which when captured and processed intelligently, offers extraordinary opportunity and mindbending implications."

'A disgrace to his uniform and his country'

On the website, ishouldbewriting knew a threat to humanity when he saw one. "Why is it that, when there was talk of a central government database and facial recognition applied to CCTV, there was an outcry, but when it's applied to social networking media so people can 'OMG' and 'LOL' at each other like fools, it's seen as a positive thing? . . . We are bound to become the tools of our tools, and people won't wake up to the fact they are slaves – to the technology if nothing else – until it's far too late . . . Wanna know the future? Laugh if you like, but it's been showcased on Star Trek. We are the Borg."

LondonHack couldn't agree more. "This is so depressingly childish, overtly commercial and downright Orwellian. Who, seriously, wants to sign up to any system that tracks your location, spending habits, web searches and phone calls on a minute-by-minute basis? It's the wet dream of a totalitarian system come to life."

'I saw how the kids loved them'

✒Speaking of Orwellian practices, on Wednesday David Leigh was reminding us about Bradley Manning, the US soldier accused of passing secrets to WikiLeaks. "Manning is allowed visits only on Saturday and Sunday," David reported. "The rest of the week he is kept in his cell 23 hours a day, fed a daily diet of antidepressant pills, forbidden to exercise in his cell, and forcibly woken if he attempts to sleep in the daytime. He is subject to a so-called 'prevention of injury' order, which among other things, deprives him of his clothes at night. He is allowed no personal possessions." Bradley's friend told him: "You can hear Bradley coming from a long way away because of the chains."

At guardian.co.uk/g2, leflore wasn't losing any sleep over it: "The twit is exactly where he should be for ever. He's a traitor and a disgrace to his uniform and country. He knew the consequences of his actions and apparently thought it was worth it." BlairM took a similarly robust line: "Oh boohoohoo for the poor widdle traitor. The man is a soldier who took an oath and then violated it by releasing confidential information. Yes, prison is where he belongs. I am not sure why the Guardian seems to want to hold a pity party for him."

Why? There was a clue in the article, and tomguard kindly pointed it out: "This man has not been tried or convicted of anything . . . His treatment amounts to nothing less than gratuitous torture."

✒Need something to lighten the tone after that? We tried on Thursday, sending Stephen Moss to a clown convention in Bognor Regis. But it was an uphill struggle. "Almost every clown I spoke to said times were hard," Stephen wrote. "Many were going back to their old trades – plumbing, carpentry – to make ends meet. Quite a few of the clowns also strike me as marginal figures, people who have had tough lives or have chosen clowning as a rejection of mainstream values . . . Almost everyone I meet seems to be divorced. Bluey Brattle, co-organiser of the convention, tells me not to believe the 'tears of a clown' cliche, but it is hard not to."

Back at guardian.co.uk/g2, your comments will have made many a jester's day. "If I am to die," said HateMale, "I hope that I do so because I have been run over by a clown's car. Watching 20 clowns come out of the car to see if I am OK will make my final moments hilarious. I'll chuckle my way into eternal void."

"I thought I hated clowns," admitted diebutterfly, "but then they arrived on the children's ward where I worked and I saw how the kids loved them – it was the adults who were afraid. I met them by chance one day and they told me they were so moved and upset by what they saw . . . It was at that moment I realised how professional they were, laughing, playing music and being silly – no patient would have guessed how much sadness they were feeling. These clowns really cared, and no matter how ridiculous their behaviour, the kids could feel that and were not afraid."

Pass us a hanky, someone. The rest of you, keep commenting.

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